Preposition Errors in Writing and Speaking by Korean EFL Learners

This paper presents an analysis of English prepositions in the corpora of spoken and written samples taken from 134 Korean university students. The corpus-based study aims at examining the salient features of preposition errors made by Korean EFL learners and the key factors causing such errors, from both intralingual and linterlingual perspectives. The results indicate that the preposition errors we identified from our learner corpora are related to either lexical confusion with the L2 itself or linguistic interferences between prepositions in the leaners’ L1 and L2. When the preposition is semantically based, the interlingual transfer between L1 and L2 can cause both misformation and addition errors. On the other hand, omission of the required errors can be explained by the leaners’ confusion with the category selection of a functional preposition, which is determined by the governor, and the preposition typically does not carry much semantic information. The students thus need to understand the particular functions of English prepositions and the linguistic knowledge of sub-categorization or form-based value., and raise cross-linguistic awareness between their L1 and L2.